Sitcom's 1st Hurdle: Getting On

TV topics

May 25, 1994|By Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times News Service

The morning they found out they had made it onto NBC's fall schedule, Kevin Bright, Marta Kauffman and David Crane popped open a bottle of champagne. They continued drinking champagne while flying from Los Angeles to New York aboard one of Warner Brothers' corporate jets. Then they had more champagne with dinner.

The next day, when they met for breakfast at the Regency Hotel, they were all still giddy.

''It's a lot like winning the lottery,'' Kauffman said. ''Except it comes with a responsibility.''

''Yeah,'' Bright interjected. ''And they can take it back.''

This past winter, Bright, Kauffman and Crane were among more than 100 production teams to propose new sitcoms to NBC. Only four made the cut, and their sitcom - first called Friends Like Us, then called Six of One and now simply Friends - might be the luckiest of the four.

It is scheduled to run at 8:30 Thursdays, right before NBC's hit show Seinfeld and right after its popular sitcom Mad About You. Neighbors like that virtually guarantee Friends a large audience, at least at the start.

Holding onto that audience is the next hurdle, and it will be a steep one. Of the new shows that go on the air every fall, fewer than a third do well enough to survive beyond the spring.

At this point, NBC has ordered 12 episodes of Friends in addition to the pilot. If the show is a success, the network will order nine more for a complete season. If it is a bomb, however, there is no guarantee that all 12 episodes will air. In fact, just last year Bright/Kauffman/Crane watched as CBS yanked its sitcom Family Album off the air after a half-dozen episodes had aired.

As soon as news got out that Friends had been picked up, the television world began swamping the team's office at Warner Brothers with calls.

To display their talents, many writers already have sent in scripts they had prepared for other shows: a small mountain of unproduced Seinfeld episodes. In the next few weeks, the team will sift through the scripts and hire roughly half a dozen writers.

Though Kauffman and Crane wrote the pilot by themselves, production demands for a regular series are such that they will need other writers in order to keep on schedule. This atelier-style of composition involves some delicate compromises.

''If something feels to us foreign to what the show is about, to what the character is, that's when you get into problems,'' Kauffman said. Before an episode goes into production, Kauffman and Crane will revise it, in some cases substantially, and, Kauffman added, ''hopefully without trampling too many egos.''

Every new program, whether a sitcom or drama, is picked for a target audience, and its success, at least from the network's perspective, is measured in those terms. Friends is supposed to be a bridge between the NBC sitcoms that precede and follow it, and to appeal to the same young adults who enjoy Mad About You and Seinfeld.

Friends is an ensemble show, meaning that all the regular characters are essentially of equal importance. It tells the story of six young adults living, sleeping and wisecracking together in New York. Among the regular cast members, only one has anything that approaches star power, and that is Courteney Cox, who played Michael J. Fox's flame on Family Ties.